The Best Linux Distros of 2018

Every year, the question pops up; which Linux distribution is best? The reason that question persists the way it does is because there is no singular concrete answer. Most distributions are purpose built for certain situations, and even when they aren't, there are bound to be conditions that they're better and worse in.

This list attempts to pin down the best distributions for common use cases and situations. These are by no means the only options, but they are arguably the best as of now. Things in the Linux world always change, so keep an eye out for new developments.

More in Tux Machines

Top 10 New Linux SBCs to Watch in 2019

A recent Global Market Insights report projects the single board computer market will grow from $600 million in 2018 to $1 billion by 2025. Yet, you don’t need to read a market research report to realize the SBC market is booming. Driven by the trends toward IoT and AI-enabled edge computing, new boards keep rolling off the assembly lines, many of them tailored for highly specific applications.
Much of the action has been in Linux-compatible boards, including the insanely popular Raspberry Pi. The number of different vendors and models has exploded thanks in part to the rise of community-backed, open-spec SBCs.
Here we examine 10 of the most intriguing, Linux-driven SBCs among the many products announced in the last four weeks that bookended the recent Embedded World show in Nuremberg. (There was also some interesting Linux software news at the show.) Two of the SBCs—the Intel Whiskey Lake based UP Xtreme and Nvidia Jetson Nano driven Jetson Nano Dev Kit—were announced only this week.

Fedora: Systemd, AskFedora, Varnish

Merged this morning into the systemd code-base was a big feature addition that's been in the works for the better part of one year by Lennart Poettering and other developers.
Merged into the systemd tree is now the OCI runtime support for nspawn. Systemd's Nspawn, their tool that can be used for starting an OS within a lightweight container, now has support for the OCI run-time specification.

Mozilla, Firefox and ChromeOS/Chrome

From the onset, our vision for Common Voice has been to build the world’s most diverse voice dataset, optimized for building voice technologies. We also made a promise of openness: we would make the high quality, transcribed voice data that was collected publicly available to startups, researchers, and anyone interested in voice-enabled technologies.
Today, we’re excited to share our first multi-language dataset with 18 languages represented, including English, French, German and Mandarin Chinese (Traditional), but also for example Welsh and Kabyle. Altogether, the new dataset includes approximately 1,400 hours of voice clips from more than 42,000 people.
With this release, the continuously growing Common Voice dataset is now the largest ever of its kind, with tens of thousands of people contributing their voices and original written sentences to the public domain (CC0). Moving forward, the full dataset will be available for download on the Common Voice site.

The Attention War. There have been many headlines related to it in the past decade. This is the idea that apps and companies are stealing attention. It’s the idea that technologists throw up ads on websites in a feeble attempt to get the attention of the people who visit the website.
In tech, or any industry really, people often say something to the effect of, “well if the person using this product or service only read the instructions, or clicked on the message, or read our email, they’d understand and wouldn’t have any problems”. We need people’s attention to provide a product experience or service. We’re all in the “attention war”, product designers and users alike.
And what’s a sure-fire way to grab someone’s attention? Interruptions. Regardless if they’re good, bad, or neutral. Interruptions are not necessarily a “bad” thing, they can also lead to good behavior, actions, or knowledge.

Google has just released an update for Chrome 73, the major update of the browser that was shipped to all supported platforms earlier this month.
Now at version 73.0.3683.86, Google Chrome comes with under-the-hood improvements on Windows, Linux, and macOS, and you can download it using the links here.

We don't have many details on exactly how Google's new search and browser picker will work; there's just a single paragraph in the company's blog post. Google says it will "do more to ensure that Android phone owners know about the wide choice of browsers and search engines available to download to their phones. This will involve asking users of existing and new Android devices in Europe which browser and search apps they would like to use."

The European Commission has hit search giant Google with a third fine, related to abuse of its AdSense advertising service, and told the company to fork out €1.49 billion (A$2.38 billion) for breaching EU anti-trust rules.

Google and the EU's European Commission are making all sorts of announcements lately. Fresh off the revelation that Google would implement a browser and search-engine picker in EU-sold Android devices, Google's advertising division is getting slapped with a fine next, to the tune of €1.5 billion ($1.69 billion). The European Commission's latest antitrust ruling says that Google's bundling of its advertising platform with its custom search engine program is anti-competitive toward other ad providers.

Programming: Learning, Java Development Kit 12, and Python Bits

Learn how to write a program:
You cannot make anything new in the computer world without programming skills. You can create windows, apps, websites, a desktop application using programming languages. Some programming languages that you can learn in your beginning level of becoming tech-savvy is Java, C, C++, Html, CSS, JAVASCRIPT, PHP, PYTHON. You can enhance your programming skills by sitting home by taking online tutorials.
Use a Linux or Unix Operating System:
If you want to be a tech- savvy I recommend using Unix operating system because a techy person mostly uses the Unix operating system in the world. Unix operating system is open source anyone can use it, and you can view its code too. So, it will help in enhancing your programming skills and learning about technical skills.

The production release of Java Development Kit 12, based on Java SE (Standard Edition) 12, is now available. JDK 12 builds are available from Oracle for Linux, Windows, and MacOS.
[...]
Open source builds are provided under the GNU General Public License v2, with Classpath Exception. Commercial builds of JDK 12 from Oracle can be found on the Oracle Technology network under a non-open source license.

A proposal to add a new dictionary operator for Python has spawned a PEP and two large threads on the python-ideas mailing list. To a certain extent, it is starting to look a bit like the "PEP 572 mess"; there are plenty of opinions on whether the feature should be implemented and how it should be spelled, for example. As yet, there has been no formal decision made on how the new steering council will be handling PEP pronouncements, though a review of open PEPs is the council's "highest priority". This PEP will presumably be added into the process; it is likely too late to be included in Python 3.8 even if it were accepted soon, so there is plenty of time to figure it all out before 3.9 is released sometime in 2021.

Debugging and profiling play an important role in Python development. The debugger helps programmers to analyze the complete code. The debugger sets the breakpoints whereas the profilers run our code and give us the details of the execution time. The profilers will identify the bottlenecks in your programs. In this tutorial, we’ll learn about the pdb Python debugger, cProfile module, and timeit module to time the execution of Python code.
This tutorial is an excerpt from a book written by Ganesh Sanjiv Naik titled Mastering Python Scripting for System Administrators. This book will show you how to leverage Python for tasks ranging from text processing, network administration, building GUI, web-scraping as well as database administration including data analytics & reporting.

Latest News

Benchmarking A 10-Core Tyan/IBM POWER Server For ~$300 USD

If you live in the EU and have been wanting to explore IBM POWER hardware on Linux, a load of Tyan Habanero servers recently became available through a German retailer for 269 EUR (~$306 USD) that comes equipped with a 10-core POWER8 processor. While not POWER9, it's still an interesting Linux-capable beast and the price is unbeatable if you have been wanting to add POWER hardware to your collection. Phoronix reader Lauri Kasanen recently bought one of these IBM POWER servers at the 269 EUR price point and has shared thoughts on this server as well as some benchmarks. Here is Lauri's guest post checking out this low-cost 2U IBM server.
Recently a batch of refurbished POWER8 servers became available for very affordable prices. Always eager to play with power, especially for netbook-class prices, I grabbed one, and decided to run some benchmarks for everyone. For comparison data I used Michael's POWER9 benchmark from November, recent enough that software versions are close enough.

today's leftovers

Apple used to have the most devices in U.S. schools, but Google soared to the top after the release of the Chromebook in 2011. In 2018, Chromebooks made up 60 percent of all laptops and tablets purchased for U.S. K-12 classrooms, up from just 5 percent in 2012. Microsoft is second at 22 percent, followed by Apple, with 18 percent of shipments to U.S. schools in 2018, according to data from Futuresource Consulting.

This was a fairly busy two weeks for the Web & design team at Canonical.
[...]
We maintain the Vanilla css framework that most of the websites at Ubuntu and Canonical use. Here are a few patterns and websites that were updated.

Library is a wiki at heart, but it uses the familiar Google Docs as its backend and editing interface, easing maintenance for a wide population of users (“we wanted to meet people where they already were, rather than trying to teach them something entirely new”).

I don’t dare to count the days until foss-north 2019, but it is very soon. One of the changes to this year is that we expand the conference with an additional community day.
The idea with the community day here is that we arrange for conference rooms all across town and invite open source projects to use them for workshops, install fests, hackathons, dev sprints or whatever else they see fit. It is basically a day of mini-conferences spread out across town.
The community day is on April 7, the day before the conference days, and is free of charge.

This month's newsletter highlights the new project the FSFE recently joined and the funding opportunities it offers, that you may want to take advantage of. You can get the latest updates on the Copyright Directive reform and the hottest news regarding Article 13, as well as a short summary of what else has happened during the past month. In the Editor's choice section this month you can find interesting news on developments with the Radio Equipment Directive, and find out who else have expressed their support for our "Public Money? Public Code!" campaign and what they have to say about it.

Server Leftovers

Google on Monday announced that it has made available its Sandboxed API as open source in an effort to make it easier for software developers to create secure products.
It’s not uncommon for applications to be affected by memory corruption or other types of vulnerabilities that can be exploited for remote code execution and other purposes. Using a sandbox ensures that the code responsible for processing user input can only access the resources it needs to, which mitigates the impact of a flaw by containing the exploit to a restricted environment and preventing it from interacting with other software components.
While sandboxing can be highly useful, Google says it’s often not easy to implement. That is why the internet giant has decided to open source its Sandboxed API, which should make it easier to sandbox C and C++ libraries. The company has also open sourced its core sandboxing project, Sandbox2, which can be used on its own to secure Linux processes.

Clouds are growing quickly as IT executives look to find more flexibility and cut costs by adopting cloud and software as a service (SaaS) applications. But most enterprises aren’t getting rid of all their on-premise systems, which means somebody needs to connect those cloud and on-premise systems. One of those “somebodies” is BMC Software.

IBM i professionals who work extensively with files in the IFS will be happy to hear a new software utility has been ported to the IBM i PASE environment that could save them a bunch of time. The open source software, called Midnight Commander, gives developers and administrators a handy command line experience that can help speed up tasks, especially when giving commands to large number of files stored on remote machines.
Midnight Commander was originally developed in 1994 as a file utility for UNIX, which was beginning to emerge from software labs to challenge minicomputer platforms of the day, such as the AS/400, as well as early Windows operating systems. Miguel de Icaza, who’s known for founding the Mono project (among others), is credited with creating Midnight Commander, but over the years development of the product has become a group effort.
The utility, which is distributed via a GNU license from www.midnightcommander.org, was largely modeled off Norton Commander, an MS-DOS utility developed in the 1980s by Norton. But Midnight Commander has evolved into its own thing over the years, and the resemblance to that old Norton product today largely is only in the name.